NVIDIA considered the GeForce
processor so revolutionary that they even gave it its own name, the GPU for
Graphics Processing Unit. Hyped as "a significant breakthrough in realism"
by NVIDIA, the goal of the GPU was to allow a video card to do complex processes
that previously had to be performed by the CPU. By distributing the workload
to the graphics card as well, game designers are, in theory, able to add enhanced
polygons to a scene (due to the GeForce's hardware Transform and Lighting) and
also enhance gameplay by using more CPU power (for such things as artificial
intelligence, ect). In reality, we are yet to see a game take much advantage
of the hardware T&L found in the GPU, meaning that all the GeForce processor
is capable to doing now is increasing frame rate in games. Perhaps this will
change in the future, however it could also end up like Intel's much touted
MMX extensions which remain to make a dent in the high performance 3D market.

Having a total of 23 million
transistors on a chip produced using .22 micron architecture, the GeForce GPU
has a fill rate of 480 Million Pixels per Second. This is significantly more
than that of TNT2 Ultra which comes in at 300 Million Pixels per Second and
thus results in an increase in frame rate in common 3D games. Therefore, in
some part, the GeForce's enhancements over its younger brother is rather astonishing.

On another note, as was
common in the days of the TNT2, many manufacturers choose to use NVIDIA's reference
design in production of a GeForce card (only the ELSA ERAZOR X and the ASUS
V6600 Deluxe reviewed here differ from the reference design). Every time that
NVIDIA releases a new processor, they also release a reference design which
tells manufacturers how to make a board. While this decreases research and development
time for the manufacturers (which is crucial for maintaining the 6 month processor
cycle that NVIDIA is on) and also ensures a degree of quality, the use of the
reference deign leaves many of the SDR GeForce cards behaving in the same way.